By Steve Pate
from SLANT 45 newsletter In the Huddle
Sasha Okhotskiy loved LEGOs. Even when the brain cancer returned and he did not always remember one day from the next, he spent hours in his room at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, making art from the little plastic pieces.At the hospital, Sasha put together smaller items. He had already built a remarkable carousel. And a four-foot-tall Empire State Building. He used 5,922 LEGOs to construct the Taj Mahal.
When Sasha passed away last August at age 11, his coach at the Plano Sports Authority volunteered to organize a basketball team, named Team Sasha, comprised of the seven boys who enjoyed playing together with Sasha. (The picture at left is of Team Sasha 3 years ago with their inspiration, Sasha Okhotskiy, seated second row, far left.)
Most of the boys were small but, like Sasha, athletic. Very early, they confronted a team with 11 players who had been together since kindergarten. Team Sasha won, 41-14. They proceeded to win 19 consecutive games without a loss.
“We just blew everybody away,” says Lynn Fellhauer, whose son Lane had been good friends with Sasha and played on the team. “Looking at them, nobody could believe this team would win. But the kids were good, and we had the spirit.”
Surely their greatest fan was Sasha’s dad, Sergei. He attended every game and sat on the bench and cheered loudly.
And despite losing on the court for the only time in the championship game last month, Team Sasha is not done just yet.
They have now become a part of SLANT 45.
And how would these seven boys like to dedicate their time to this huge Super Bowl XLV creative learning initiative? By collecting LEGOs, of course, and donating them to Children’s Medical Center.
Lynn Fellhauer owns The Graphic Edge, a graphics design company that makes large posters and banners and signs. While online one day researching Super Bowl XLV’s Emerging Business Program for minority- and women-owned businesses, she spotted the SLANT 45 logo and decided to look into the program.
“We had already been talking about doing a community service project,” Lynn says. “In the Jewish community, they call it a mitzvah — doing a good deed. We knew how much Sasha loved LEGOs, so we decided to collect LEGOs at our schools, our churches, our temples in honor of Sasha.”
She adds, “Children get that their parents and religious leaders and teachers care about community service. But when their heroes, like football players, get involved, then they feel that it’s kind of important.”
Lynn is now the project coach for Team Sasha’s newest endeavor. For hospital sanitation reasons, the LEGOs they collect must be new and still in their packages.
Lane, age 12, says they hope to collect 100 boxes of LEGOs this summer. Or, as he puts it, “Enough to make everybody happy.”
Lane adds, “Sasha liked LEGOs so much, and it’s a good thing to do for kids who can’t be as active as they want to be. He built amazing things. So this is cool; it’s exciting.”
Lane and the other boys never abandoned Sasha. From the time his headaches began in the second grade and the tumor was found, they stuck by him through chemotherapy and radiation treatments. When he beat it that time, he remained a superior athlete.
And when the cancer returned even worse in the summer of his fifth grade year, the children visited him at the hospital throughout the treatments.
“Adults cannot handle anybody passing away,” Lynn says, “and it’s really even harder for a child. How do you explain to them — your friend? You can’t.”
And yet, through it all, perhaps Sasha’s friends have learned a good deal more about life than death.
And then there is this: On the night that Team Sasha walked off the court with their 19th and final victory, Olga Okhotskiy gave birth to her second child, a son named Elan.
Someday Elan will hear the stories of his older brother’s legend, of Sasha’s joys with LEGOs and the championship run of Team Sasha and the Super Bowl program SLANT 45, where the spirit lives on.
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